"The bones of ten thousand men rot for each general who becomes great."

--

Epicurus

La Triviata

Arguably, the most elaborate field fortifications in history before the Great War, were the 130 miles-long “Lines of Brabant,” built by French Marshal Louis François, le duc de Boufflers, from Antwerp along the Scheldt and Lys Rivers to Aire in France, during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), which included an inner defensive line of some 70-miles, stretching from Antwerp to Huy.

During the campaign in the Chesapeake Bay region in 1814 which resulted in the British burning of Washington, patriotic citizens of Alexandria, Virginia, supplied 16,000 barrels of flour, 1,000 hogsheads of tobacco, and 150 bales of cotton to the enemy, at a tidy profit, while actively discouraging efforts by the state militia to attack the enemy.

When the French Army went to war against Prussia in 1870, its maps of France were not as good as those it had of Germany, and those reportedly were inferior to the ones on hand for Algeria.

In the course of the Second World War, there were 6,350 fatal aviation accidents involving Army Air Forces aircraft in the continental United States.

During the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) the staff of the War Department comprised the Secretary, nine clerks, two messengers, and a handyman, plus occasional officers seconded for special duties, which proved sufficient to manage operations by some 75,000 troops on some seriously distant battlefields.

As a result of the services of its troops under British command during the American Revolution, when they returned in 1783 the German principality of Brunswick acquired a “Negro Drum Corps,” composed of black men recruited in the rebellious colonies.

In 1817, shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British Army had 818,282 muskets stockpiled, in addition to the approximately 200,000 in the hands of the troops.

During the First World War, most of states raised “State Guard” units to provide for internal security and emergency service, for a total of about 79,000 troops, who were supplemented by some 26,000 “United States Guards,” who provided security for government installations, all of whom were recruited from men ineligible for the draft.